Sidney who? Meyers rescues Victorian poet from obscurity

It was the mention
of the 1887 Newdigate Prize for poetry that first caught Terry Meyers’
attention in 2008 as he skimmed an English bookseller’s catalogue offering for
sale a notebook of poems by someone whose name he barely recognized.

Oxford
University’s prestigious prize for best composition in English verse by an
undergraduate student has been around since 1805, and was captured by the likes
of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde and the recent poet laureate Andrew
Motion.

Sidney
Alexander? Meyers admits to some “vague” knowledge that Alexander’s winning
poem, on the life of Buddha, was known as one of the signs in Victorian England
of an interest in the East.

As far as
the man himself, he was a mystery.

Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English at
William & Mary, collects literary
material from the Victorian Age – first editions, letters, manuscripts, mostly
relating to the nefariously subversive Algernon Charles Swinburne. But he decided to take the plunge. After all,
the notebook of Alexander’s mostly unpublished works was modestly priced at
about $110.

“As I read
through it, I realized that Sidney Alexander (1866-1948) may not be the
greatest poet in the Victorian Age -- he may be one of the deservedly obscure
poets in English literary history -- but I also was intrigued,” Meyers said.
“Despite evidence in the notebook that he was beginning to shape a literary
career – something he’d been fascinated by since his days at (the heralded) St.
Paul’s School (in London)-- in the end he became an ecclesiastic, one of the
canons of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

All of which
might make for some conversation at a cocktail party, Meyers thought, but
wasn’t likely to be interesting to the general public, or to publishers.

Then Meyers gave
a plenary talk at a conference in London on Swinburne, and met some people from
the University of London who sponsored a website that hosted scholarly works.
They were familiar with Meyers because of his work on Swinburne, and, when he
approached them about Alexander, became intrigued with his work with Swem
Library in presenting the transcription and digital images of the ledger of Richard Manning Bucktrout,
a 19th century Williamsburg undertaker and businessman.

They were
interested in Alexander, Meyers believes, because the project was a rare
opportunity to bring to light an unpublished manuscript and to be able to
publish electronic scans of the manuscript pages and annotated transcriptions
of a young poet’s work as it evolved from his schoolboy days through his time
at Oxford and a bit beyond.

In January,
“The Poetry of Sidney A. Alexander” was posted online by
the University of London’s Institute of English Studies. It’s 469 pages long
(including a biographical and critical introduction) and free to the public. And it chronicles the development, Meyers
says, “of a Victorian poet who abandoned his nascent literary ambitions”
despite having published poems in some leading publications of the day.

Meyers is quick to praise Michael O’Brien ’10, Shelly Holder
’11 and Jane Ryngaert ’13, students who, funded by an endowment from John Rochelle Lee
Johnson, Jr., handled what the professor calls important “scut” work,
everything from transcribing to scanning pages.

That would be interesting enough, at least for specialists
in Victorian religious poetry, if the story ended there. But Alexander’s life
is of more than passing interest.

After apparently relinquishing his dream to become a poet in
the mold of religious poet John Donne – Alexander makes mention of a second
notebook, though there are no clues as to its whereabouts – he was ordained a
priest. He was ambitious, aiming finally
to become, like Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s.

That never happened and an embittered Alexander remained a
canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, responsible for fund-raising and for protecting
the property from damage from commercial development in the City and from
German bombs during the Blitz of World War II.

“He was instrumental in working with fire
brigades and volunteers to put out the fires and protect the fabric of the
building,” Meyers said. “If there had not been that kind of organized
protection of the structure, there’s every likelihood it would have been much
more seriously damaged.”

And earlier, as London was expanding its
subway lines, Alexander worked tirelessly at raising money to fortify cathedral
foundations that were both shallow and literally built on sand.

“It’s not the kind of responsibility you
associate with a cleric,” Meyers said, “but obviously someone has to watch out
for such things.”

Meyers said that although some of Alexander’s
poems do have a larger interest, the greatest contribution Alexander’s notebook
makes is as “an interesting cultural artifact.”

“He was a precocious and well-educated young
poet in the 1880s, and that’s just the time in English history when the movement
of art for art’s sake was developing,” Meyers explained. “You can see an
evolution where he moves away from only religious poetry and only didactic
poetry to poetry that’s a little more concerned with capturing a mood or
impression or drawing some picture that doesn’t necessarily have some immediate
moral or religious quality to it. It’s an interesting cultural marker for those
10 years in English poetry.”